In my last few attempts at configuring my mythtv installation (my most recent being today when I replaced the hard drive), I’ve gotten this error when I log into my box through SSH:
MythTV status for localhost
===========================
Status...........: Wed Feb 18 2009, 8:30 PM
Total Disk Space.: Total space is 548,770 MB, with 158,049 MB used (28.8%)
Next Recording In: 2 Hours, 59 Minutes

I get most of the status for the server, but I don’t get the read outs of the conflicts because of the error.

What happens (as far as I understand it) is that when the cronjob generates the motd, it runs as root, and root does not have a link to the mythtv config, so it can’t get the data from the database. So, to get around this, we need to create a link in /root/.mythtv/ to the config.xml file for the server. For me, this runs from my home directory /home/thomas/.mythtv/config.xml so:
sudo ln -s /home/thomas/.mythtv/config.xml /root/config.xml

Once you make this change, the next time the cronjob runs it should populate the motd correctly.